Currently, the schools in the United States are wasting around 2 billion dollars a year on paper. A study by David Wees on paper use in schools looked at just how much is being spent by schools on paper in the United States. Wees came to an educated conclusion that schools are using an estimated 34 billion sheets of paper each year, with an annual cost of 2 billion dollars. This year, more schools are doing their best to cut down on paper usage than ever, and many are going completely paperless!

We met with a High School teacher Brittney Goodwin who is helping her school go paperless, and we discussed how she is managing this. Brittney Goodwin of Banning High School in Banning, Southern California is determined to save the hours spent in copying and printing out documents for her classroom by moving them to the cloud and putting Banning High Schools’ 1:1 Chromebooks to good use.

The students and teachers at Banning High School love to use their 1:1 Chromebooks. Before they had their Chromebooks, the majority of their work was completed by paper. Worksheets were often saved in PDF format, and the teachers would have to print the document and distribute it to their students and collect them back at the deadline. Any teacher knows that managing a paper can be challenging at the best of times and Goodwin was searching for a better way of managing this. With Williams Compliancy, a process wherein the state of California students are required to have access to materials outside of the classroom just like they do inside the classroom, there has been a huge increase in learning resources made available to students. Paper consumption was getting out of hand, and while Williams Compliancy is great for all students and teachers, they needed a solution to printing and distributing all of these documents. This is where Kami comes in. Kami allows students to do anything with their documents within their browser as if they had printed it out – except lose it!

With Kami, you can view, create, edit, highlight, and draw on the file. Kami is your learning tool that can keep up with Millennials in the classroom. It enables the user to create content easily with its accessible and ergonomic interface. When used by teachers in the classroom, it integrates and engages the students with its various features. Kami has Google Classroom Integration, allowing teachers to send out homework to students and receive it once completed, with all of the annotations made in Kami still there.

As an English teacher, Goodwin plans to use Kami every single day. “It makes my life so much easier. I don’t have to convert files from a PDF to a different type of document, and I can use publishers provided PDF documents and have my students annotate and then upload those to our Google Classroom.”